After you’ve chosen a name for your art website (see article here), you need to get hep to hosting it.

There’s a real quick and easy explanation of where WordPress websites live:

Your website doesn’t “live” on your computer, even though you control it from your computer.

Your website “lives” on a special computer called a server.

When a website is on a server, it’s “hosted” on that server; meaning, websites are hosted on servers (exceptions need not concern us here).

If you read my previous article on choosing a website name, you’ll remember that there are companies, such as GoDaddy, that facilitate and take care of the process of naming your website. There are also companies, often the same companies, who will host your website for you.

Just to make things more complicated, there’s more than one kind of hosting.

There’re 4 kinds of hosting:

Domain hosting

When you buy your domain name (see article), it’s a bit of a misnomer. You don’t own it so much as rent it, and you have to pay that company that registered it (hence the name ‘registrar’) for the right to use that name. Meaning, they “host” the domain for you, and you have to shovel over a few bucks every year.

But just because you registered a domain name with the company, that does NOT mean that you have to host your website with them!

In a lot of cases you can, as is the case with GoDaddy, but there are other options available…

Email hosting

This is where your emails happen. For instance, if you use Gmail, and I think that you should, you need to have your website name pointing from where you registered your domain name, to Gmail. A phone call to your registrar is all it takes. Then you can use a custom email name, in Gmail, like for instance [email protected]

I should point out that this is NOT the same as email marketing software; this is how and where people email you, not how you email people in groups (more coming on email marketing…!)

Media hosting

This mostly refers to videos, but can include photographs and music.

You don’t, in a strict sense, “Put videos on your website”, you put the video in specific places, like YouTube, Vimeo, Amazon S3, etc.

Then you just paste a line of code on you website (called an embed code) and your host server runs over and tells the video service to dish up the video. Not unlike a waiter running over to the bartender and ordering your drinks instead of having to mix them himself; he just delivers. Much faster, and a smoother experience for folks on your site.

Web hosting

Again, this is where your website lives. Hosting companies have different packages depending on your needs. The more data used, which usually means more traffic/viewers, the more it costs to host your website.

If you’re just starting out, or are making a fresh start, my recommendation is to use GoDaddy.

If you have much online experience, I can see that you’re hollering and waving your hands in protest at that recommendation, but for greenhorns, GoDaddy works fine to get them started. They can upgrade when they’re ready.

They can register your domain name, set up your email in Gmail, and host your website, and it can be done typically in just a few minutes, with you on the phone with them as they do it.

However…

If you’re getting over a thousand visitors a month, or you need to have more sophistication to your online operations, you’ll want to upgrade hosting your art website.

You can even go so far as to have a dedicated server, meaning, that the only website on that server is you. But there’s quite a bit involved, and it starts around $600 a month.

That’s going to be overkill. But there are alternatives.

Like Cloud Hosting.

What’s Cloud Hosting?!

It’s hosting that’s “in the cloud”, meaning that there’s no ONE place your website or other information is stored. Your website is actually on several servers in various places around the world.

It’s how all the big ones do it: Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc. There’s no one place that hosts Amazon’s website; it’s all over the globe, on countless servers.

3 reasons to take the next step to Cloud Hosting

1. Speed

Speed is hugely important for 2 reasons:

a slow website will cost you business, as people hate waiting for things to load, and

Google rewards fast websites.

All things being equal, the faster website will show higher in the search rankings than the slower website. Google is obsessive about the user’s experience. They don’t want to take their users to a slow, crappy website.

Think of it this way: if you’re in a shopping mall, there’re several ways you can exit and enter the mall. Now imagine there was only ONE door in the entire place, and everyone had to pass in and out that one place. And now it’s Christmas Eve…

Right, nothing’s moving fast; everything bogs down.

That’s kind of what happens with web hosting.

A person looking at your site means their browser is sending requests for information, and the server processes this request and dishes out whatever it is they’re looking at. Ideally, it happens in the blink of an eye, but the more traffic, the more requests, and now everything’s trying to pass through that one little hole.

But when you use cloud hosting, the people viewing your site can have it coming in from all sorts of places to maximize the speed and efficiency!

Also, viewers tend to get the closest server showing them, meaning that if someone in Australia is looking at your website based in Schenectady, New York, they’ll actually have the site “fed” to them from the closest server location, rather than have info bouncing halfway around the world (and taking its sweet time in the process).

2. Reliability

Nothing stinks worse than having your online business grow, only to have a technical glitch crash everything on you (ask me how I know). A power outage, natural disaster, cyber-attack, equipment malfunction…you name it.

When your site is Cloud Hosted, there’s no weak spot. If one server gets shut down due to an earthquake or hurricane, the rest of the system around the world picks up the slack. Seamlessly. Automatically. You’d never even know.

3. Security

You may have heard of “bots”, or “spiders”. These are small bits of software that rummage around the Internet doing various jobs. In fact, over 50% of all website traffic, is bots.

Most are good, some are very, very bad.

Google’s bots are good; they index the Internet to make it more useful for everyone.

Then there’re the Malware bots…they scour the web looking for vulnerabilities. They look for websites that haven’t been updated, or are using old software, or haven’t been set up properly.

Hacking isn’t personal

I can’t tell you how many discussions I’ve had with artists who seem to shrug off thoughts of security. They think “why would anyone want to hack my website?” They avoid dealing with security because they fear it’s too complicated, and it kind of is, and they find out sooner or later that their website has been hacked.

SiteGround

I just changed The Colonel’s site over to Siteground, and it’s been spot on so far. It also has inexpensive hosting packages starting at just $3.95 a month!

And their customer service is very good.

WP Engine

The Rolls Royce of Hosting for The Average Person. I’ve used WP Engine for over 2 years as of this writing, and I couldn’t be happier.

WP Engine is tailored specifically for WordPress sites; it’s all they do.

I don’t claim to have a perfect understanding over how this website stuff works, but I know that when I phone WP Engine, I get a pleasant person who answers my questions and walks me through whatever I need doing – and without that snotty “pfhfhft…” attitude that some places have when dealing with someone who needs help with the basics.

Warning: DO NOT go for the “free” WordPress hosted site. You need your own domain name, not yourname.wordpress.com, you need yourname.com. Be professional! The first person that mentions the “free WP” hosting option in the comments gets excommunicated!

WP does have a ‘free’ hosted option (don’t!) and Fine Art America will host a site for you too, basically like Shopify does. I believe that FAA also has a WP plugin so you can have a ‘buy button’ on your WP site that connects to your FAA site. but I have no experience with it.

But I do know that Shopify has much more functionality, and is more customizable.

There’re different ways of having an online presence, but I’m a staunch believer in having your OWN site, either on WP or Shopify (of course there are others too)

Hi Owen, I recently moved my WP.org site to Cloud Hosting with Bluehost, mostly for speed. It sure took care of that with my image-heavy site. I thought I also understood its other advantages, but my site went down for a few hours one day and when I contacted Bluehost, they said – if I remember well – that even if it’s in the cloud, if their server goes down, it goes down. Not very techy so don’t remember the details, but I was shocked and very disappointed to have my site go down yet again even if I’d moved to the cloud. So I’m not sure about your #2 on Reliability.

I didn’t say “100% guaranteed to work perfectly all the time”, anymore than seatbelts and airbags are 100% guarantee that one will be unscathed in a car accident…but it’s far, far better than not having that protection. A snag with Bluehost doesn’t mean hosting in the cloud is a bad idea. Bluehost only uses 3 servers, which is technically “cloud”, but only just.

I have been using Hostgator for several years, primarily because I have several domains on two different platforms. For people just needing a single wordpress website, Bluehost is also a great place to start.

I’ve found, and have spoken to numerous others, that Hostgator (since a recent acquisition) is riddled with security and slowness issues. They used to be terrific, and MTA was hosted there once upon a time…proceed with caution!! 🙂

I took the same WP 101 course that we offer through MTA, which will give one a functioning knowledge of WordPress in an afternoon. From that point, if there’s something I want to do but don’t know how, I look for a plugin, or Google it. I’m FAR from an expert, but it’s easier now than it was even 3 years ago.

Here’s the problem most folks run into: they don’t systemize how they learn. They begin a course, but in the first to lessons they think “I know this” and begin jumping around. They muddle. They kind of futz with it until they sort get it going, then don’t learn anything else.

They other problem I’ve seen is that artists insist on sticking with free or trial options of tings, then get stuck. They problem with free is that there’s no money for support staff, so it’s hard to get questions answered or problems fixed. There’s also only so much motivation on company’s part to keep improving things as there’s no money in it.

Watch the videos. Read the articles. Don’t skim.

Of course, I don’t know if this describes your WP journey or not…!

WordPress is very easy if you start at the beginning, and if you go with a company that has good customer service, when you hit a snag, just pick up the phone and ask. Most of the time they will actually do the thing for you!

I liked them when I was with them, but they’re not as easy to tweak as Shopify is (in my experience), and after I’d done all the tweaking over several months, I couldn’t use a “one click upsell”, which is vital to my processes (not necessarily other artist’s)…AND I’d have to do it all over again because the templates in BC weren’t mobile friendly, though they are now (natch).

I was very happy with BC’s customer service and pricing, but the advantages of having a WP site – faster and more secure hosting via WP Engine, ability to make one click upsells*, ease of customizing, and being able to add a Shopify or Woo Commerce ‘Add to Cart’ button made the decision for me.

*To clarify, Shopify doesn’t have One Click Upsell functionality either; that would have to be cobbled together.

I used to use GoDaddy, but stopped when I found out that the CEO was a big game hunter who likes to kill elephants. I could not in good conscience support such a company. And their service was certainly not stellar.

I used Bluehost for all my sites, and for domain names, and I recently switched over to the cloud hosting they offer. I have been happy with them for years.